Final Fantasy Hacktics

This one here is just an idea I had for a full-screen 'sword-punch' type thing:

EDIT:
Cleaned it up: (http://lijj.ffhacktics.com/FLSW1.gif)
It's supposed to play a lot faster; I doubt getting it to flow at full speed would be hard in-game; I think it's a browser thing.
Here are the single frames in sheet form:

Quote from: Lijj on June 04, 2012, 11:15:28 pm
This one here is just an idea I had for a full-screen 'sword-punch' type thing:
(http://www.dumpt.com/img/viewer.php?file=hmq952fqucj2ejjqpmfs.gif)
And if it plays slow just DL it and open from harddrive:
[img=http://www.dumpt.com/img/files/hmq952fqucj2ejjqpmfs_thumb.gif] (http://www.dumpt.com/img/viewer.php?file=hmq952fqucj2ejjqpmfs.gif)

How will you implement this?

I wouldn't know.. I hope it can be implemented is all; that's up to those in the coding dept.
I was hoping it could go a little faster in-game at what ever the frame rate is full-screen over the battle screen

Centering the camera on the attacker sprite, turning the camera for the target to le on the left, and displaying the effect full screen.

Great! I think these will look good then. In that case I'll clean it up to perfection and start making a few more. I can post the frames too but it might be best to just pass it to either you or Lirmont as a layered psd file. As a single layer sheet it's awkward cause it's such a long image but necessary for animating.

Im sorry, forgive me if I am confused.

|||| are you trying to do this in game? or just a fun .gif?

I'm assuming Tethical Effects work differently then FFT effects Dino.

Quote from: Elric on June 05, 2012, 10:53:16 pm
I'm assuming Tethical Effects work differently then FFT effects Dino.

WOW- I am a smart kid. I didn't realize this was under Tethical forum. (Thanks Elric)

Please ignore all my comments. Thanks.

(http://darkabstraction.com/showOff/ffhackticks/sprite-animator-preview-l01.png)

Download: flame-sword-punch (format) (http://darkabstraction.com/showOff/ffhackticks/flame-sword-punch.zip).

Unfortunately, the graphics handling in .NET 2.0 (what the program is currently compiled as in my release link) doesn't handle large files well, so you won't be able to open it in the program without it crashing. Sorry.

Damn huge file..
I'll halt work on the next full-screen wip- 'poison dragon', til I can discuss specifics with either you or Kivutar in chat. We would be able to shrink the individual frame size down; since that massive "sprite"sheet is bogging it down.

@Dino I get why you were asking now :lol:. I just hope I wasn't too optimistic in thinking that anything was possible.

It's not that it's not possible in-game. It's just that the design ideas between animating and movie clips are different. What you've come up with is basically a 44-frame long movie clip. It can't take advantage of any animation features because it doesn't have any component parts (in .GIF format, at least). To get this to display in-game, it will require using one of Panda3D's tools to turn each frame of the movie clip into a "card" (geometry that's shown on the screen) so that it can just flip through actual image files instead of one very large image; that's already written for us and available. However, there's not currently code (to my knowledge) that differentiates between such a thing for in-game effects (though .BMP/.PNG files mapping to .XML formats from my sprite animator and .EGG formats made from Panda's card maker program can be easily distinguished by file type).

I can guess how much time a 44-frame animation must have taken, so I'm only providing the following description as a comparison of design ideas. I'm in no way saying you should re-do your work in this manner.

Basically, to use the advantages that sprite animation gives you, you first need to use your current end result as a story board, detailing what will happen in each frame of the animation. From there, you need to develop the components. In this case, one single image of the sword (and only one) needs to be made a component part, giving it its own box in a sprite sheet; it will be rotated and have opacity applied to it at the hardware level (i.e. your graphics card). You also need to come up with one background image (yes, this requires holding back the orginal design), preferably one that can repeat either left to right, top to bottom, or both left to right and top to bottom; this gets its own box in the sprite sheet; it also doesn't have to be 512x480, since you can use the tool to tell the graphics card to scale up a smaller image; color changes will be applied to it at the hardware level. Finally, you need to develop several fire components to be used as particles; each of these get their own box in the sprite sheet; pick these based on how they blend together via blending modes (sprite animator/graphics cards support most PS7 blending modes). For instance, you want parts that will blend close to white, so fire particles that color dodge towards white when overlapping are good choices.

Once you've set that up, then you'd start making the sprite animator format, first telling the program where the components are (sprite animator calls these "frames"), then putting those components into their own frame (sprite animator calls these "composite frames"). Composite frames are where you document what goes where, what its scale is, what its rotation is, what color to apply over it, what blending mode to apply, etc. The result is an image that's much smaller and only contains the absolute necessary parts for the animation. Again, a difference of approaches for this particular effect that can just be shown by adding a branch to the effect display code that says, "Is it an .EGG? Okay, run the animation. Is it over? Okay, back to what we were doing."